Building Wireless

Three things surprised me when I first started looking at Building Wireless Community Networks. The first was its diminutive size - in a market where technical reference materials are often tome-like archives, the format here is just 15 x 23cm, and only 8mm thick with 125 pages. Second, the small size doesn't equate to a small cost: the standard cover price is £17.50. And the third? Well, it's actually a damned good read.

That's not to say it's without flaws, however, which are almost totally down to the broadly US-centric content. The clues are all there, from the author being the system administrator for the O'Reilly network itself, to the appendices featuring links to US-based community wireless sites and a reprinting of the FCC 'Part 15' rules relating to radio emissions and the law in the US. You might think that this doesn't matter - many of the best reference books are US-centric - and you can still pull useful detail from the examples and adjust them to suit your domestic needs. While this is true when it comes to the technology overviews, general planning strategies and troubleshooting problems, it misses by a mile on legislation, which differs greatly between Britain and the US.

This aside, Rob Flickenger has done a remarkable job of squeezing in a lot of pertinent and hands-on material into such a small amount of space, and managed to keep it both readable and reliable throughout. His familiarity with 802.11b is obvious; his passion for it equally so. Having built a community-based WLAN in northern California, Flickenger is able to bring a nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject by using real-world examples. This means you get more practical advice than you might expect from a seemingly lightweight volume - and this is the core material that can cross the ocean successfully. For example, sections on considering the topology of the location, power levels and losses of aerial types, privacy and security issues are all good.

Read in conjunction with online sources for UK legal information such as the Radiocommunications Agency (www.radio.gov.uk) it provides a useful introduction to a complex and interesting subject, which, despite the small size, is good value for money.

Author: Davey Winder